The awesome Deborah Friedes has set up a new dance blog directory here. So, you can find all participating dance blogs in one place. So much easier than going down blogrolls clicking on URLs one by one, and so much more aesthetically inviting than RSS feeds. Thanks Deborah! And, if you write a dance blog, be sure to add yours!
National Book Award Podcasts, W/ Update
For anyone who may be interested, the National Book Awards are happening right now, I think somewhere around Wall Street. Anyway, Ed Champion’s podcasts are quite entertaining — particularly this one with Candace Bushnell (#5). Hmmm, I wonder if Mr. Bushnell is there…
Update: Had a little too much fun reading all the tweets last night during the national book awards. I was following three journalists covering the event — one kind of curmudgeonly (but aren’t the smart-asses always the most fun!), one serious, and one all genuinely excited about everything. So, something would happen — dinner break, a winner announced, an interview with literary bigshot at the press table, an announcer who got a little carried away with an introduction — and you’d get three completely hilariously diverse perspectives:
“B giving speech” / “B giving emotional, compelling speech” / “B ‘more inflated than a helium tank.'” (that one, my fave of the night, is an actual quote).
Or, “going to interview B from C publication” / “shit, here comes D w/ camera; am trying to look busy.”
Or, “time for dinner, be back soon” / “oooh, caviar and whipped butter atop little toast points!” / “cream is rancid, bread is stale; journalists seriously pissed.”
Anyway, how funny would it be if dance writers did the same covering some dance event — a gala, or opening night extravaganza of some big, much-touted company. Of course a lot of interested people might actually be at the event and wouldn’t need to read via computer. But no matter, we’ll all just whip out cellphones during intermissions, or carry them around with us if at a party, bumping smack into each other while laughing or rolling our eyes at each other’s quips as shown on the faces of our Blackberrys and Iphones. I mean, when you think about it — how much better than actual talking. Human vocal chords can only reach so far. With a mobile, you can be heard easily by all in attendance, even rooms away, and of course by those not at the event as well. This is how people will communicate in the future — no words spoken with actual mouths; the room will be pure silence, save only the clicking of cell phone type pads. I’m a better writer than talker anyway, so fine with me…
RIP Clive Barnes
The Times Liked Center Stage 2
“Some of the acting is stilted in spots, but the dancing is fantastic. And the leitmotif of class resentment is an apt one for the times.” Scroll down to the bottom to see the short review. The critic is a television not dance writer. I guess it shows what different audiences’ expectations may be. Via Selly whose review (with a good many comments) is here.
Sunday Perusing
If you’re having a lazy Sunday afternoon, here’s some reading. Some of these links are a bit old; you may have read them already:
Joan Acocella on San Francisco Ballet (she likes at least two of the same dancers as I, and gives a good overview on the company and reasoning behind its repertoire);
Robert Gottlieb reviews a new book on Balanchine by Nancy Goldner (whose writing sounds comfortably accessible, almost bloggy!) in the NY Review of Books;
Apollinaire Scherr on how to view a Wheeldon ballet, and suggestions for Wheeldon’s future in this troubled economy;
James Wolcott, in his usual hilariously hyperbolical manner, recounts his experience with ABT’s new ballet Citizen;
Alex Ross explains what went wrong between the original Doctor Atomic and the Met’s version of the opera;
Claudia La Rocco laments Gerard Mortier’s decision not to take on the directorship of New York City Opera and wonders what will happen with the planned Brokeback Mountain opera (which I was really looking forward to);
Counter Critic reflects on the passage of Proposition 8 in California.
Happy Sunday, everyone. I’m off to cover my first dance class for Explore Dance. First, meaning, I’ve never written formally about a dance class before… Please wish me luck!
Finding Your Ideal Postsynaptic Partner To Form the Perfect Synapse
Or something like that! My friend and fellow dance blogger Jolene is this insanely amazing combination Med School / Neuroscience PhD student with prior ballet training who somehow finds time to blog extensively about music, theater, and dance in the Bay area. Anyway, she read about this contest hosted by Science Magazine and then picked up by the New York Times on choreographing your PhD dissertation. Finding it a good way to promote “conversation between science and the arts” she decided to participate. Watch her entry and learn more about her project here. Gorgeously deep ending dip makes me very jealous… 🙂 Very original, Jolene!
Race and Dance and Politics and Literature
If you haven’t already, make sure to read (and listen to) Claudia La Rocco’s excellent WNYC post containing interviews with several NYC dance artists speaking about the role of race in their work and how they view the election. She apparently came up with the idea to do the interviews after an angry back and forth between Time Out editors and readers over the fact that the magazine’s list of top 40 New Yorkers who’ve made the most impact on the city over the last decade is, as Claudia put it, rather “monochromatic.”
At least things are different in the literary world. Check out the list of recent Whiting Award recipients. Also, Galley Cat is doing a series of author interviews about the election. Here’s one with poet Douglas Kearney over harmful language used in political speeches. His upcoming projects sound very cool.
Let's Just Do Away With Words
we don’t really need them to, like, communicate intelligently or anything…
(Steve, a ballroom friend of mine, showing me his favorite newspaper for arts coverage last October, during our studio’s “field trip” to see Pasha and Anya on the SYTYCD tour)
For those who haven’t already heard, that paper, The NY Sun, folded the other day (leaving Joel Lobenthal — one of the better dance critics imo — presumably out of a job) along with two other arts-heavy alternative weeklies, The Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper (via Galley Cat).
Another unfolding drama in the literary arts world is that the Nobel prizes winners are scheduled to be announced soon, but the Swedish head of the literature committee has apparently told Americans we’re being left out of the running; we’re too insular, uninvolved in the world, we “don’t translate enough and don’t participate in the world’s great dialog of literature.” Of course this has angered many, including David Remnick, EIC of The New Yorker; here is Galley Cat’s snarling response.
I seem to buy a lot of translations so it would be nice if Mr. Engdahl was more specific on what is not being translated here, and I don’t know what he means by our failure to participate in the world’s great literary dialog, but I disagree with him that all of our writers are insular, though the ones who come to mind first who are not (Junot Diaz, Colson Whitehead, David Foster Wallace, etc.) are probably too young in their literary careers (tragically of course in Wallace’s case) to be considered for this “body of work” award. Still, this line of his resonates: “U.S. writers are ‘too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,’ dragging down the quality of their work.” I’m not sure if it’s the writers or the publishers, but I do think we’re far too concerned here with how much money the work will make, which in large part depends on how “trendy” is its topic or author. I do think we’d be hard-pressed to argue with him that a work’s artistic merit is generally more important in Europe, its dollar ‘value’ more so here. And where has this fixation on money gotten us?…
Sorry!
Blogging will resume as soon as a Wednesday deadline passes, I promise!
In the meantime, here are a few things to keep you entertained:
1) Christopher Wheeldon (choreographer and artistic director of Morphoses — upcoming next month at City Center) talks ballet and creativity on Big Think here, here, and here; general Wheeldon link here. (Also, read some Morphoses dancer and choreographer blogs here);
2) check out Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet‘s Project 52, a year-long documentary on the company in weekly video installments;
3) Claudia La Rocco discusses the new Broadway musical Fela!;
4) a discussion I found interesting about whether J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye should still be required reading for high schoolers, or whether it no longer has adequate “currency” so as to resonate with young people today, here, here, and here;
and
5) if you’re interested in the writing life, guest blogger Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, turned The Elegant Variation into a crash course on creative writing last week. His entries begin here.
Okay, wish me luck!
SYTYCD, Desmond Richardson, Claudia LaRocco & Dance Criticism, and Blasted TAC Headaches!
Obviously this is a lot for one post 🙂
First, my HuffPost on this week’s SYTYCD episode is now up. I’m still so excited Richardson was on this week’s show (I hope that picture I posted wasn’t too corny! — it’s the only one I have of him and I just felt like it was ‘real’ you know…) Anyway, I love Nigel Lythgoe for doing this, for working so hard to expand that show, bringing on all these renowned performers and choreographers, showcasing world dance. The group Bollywood number was fabulous. It’s so cool that TV audiences are getting to see the things people who live in the large cities take for granted and huge kudos to Nigel for that.
Second, I’ve had a head pain episode (I refuse to call them ‘headaches’ because those are the things people get that are alleviated with one Advil and a glass of water) since last Saturday, which is the longest one of these has ever lasted. My biggest problem, besides the pain, is that I was diagnosed with both common migraines and Trigeminal Autonomic Cephalgia, which is a rare neurological condition (although, judging by my blog stats, is becoming less rare) which I don’t entirely understand, but which causes severe, knife-stabbing-like pains to one side of the head, combined with numbness and sinus-like symptoms (loss of hearing, swollen, watery eye which I enjoy calling ‘golf ball eye’ because that’s how wonderful it looks, clogged nostril, and sinus-like pressure) to the same side of the face with the stabs. With a migraine it’s more like there’s a pounding or a throbbing or a pulsing than a stabbing, they don’t last as long, and there’s some sinus-like pressure but without the intense symptoms (no golf-ball eye or excessive tearing, no real hearing loss). Sometimes the migraine ‘just’ remains a migraine — I say ‘just’ because it’s obviously still painful in itself but at least it usually responds, for the most part, to my migraine medication. But sometimes the pounding is not really a migraine but the beginning of the TAC stabbing. Maybe a migraine can even turn into a TAC… I never know what medication to take (since I have different meds for each type, it’s dangerous to take more than one within a certain period and taking the proper one can make all the difference). I have a neurologist but there is so little known about this condition, he doesn’t have a lot of answers. And there’s nothing on the internet written for a lay audience, which is beyond frustrating. I’d start an internet support group if I had the time… Anyway, all that is by way of explaining why I haven’t been writing much lately…
Third, I was very excited to receive a comment on an earlier post from none other than Claudia LaRocco, poet and dance critic for The New York Times! Apropos of her recent post about dance criticism on her newish blog, The Culturist, and a conversation she’d had with another writer, she had asked what I thought the role of judgment was in criticism, whether it was inherent to the form. I’m still thinking about it, but thought I’d put the question up in case others have thoughts too. I think there has to be some judgment in the analysis. I think criticism that is poetically written is a joy to read on its own (Laura Jacobs writes like that as well as Claudia), and I do think criticism is an art form in and of itself. But I’m finding by reading Edwin Denby and some earlier dance writers that I still think there has to be some judgment about the dance, that speaks in way to where the dance and dancers stand in the canon of Dance and of performers past and present. You feel a sense of history and continuity of an art form when you read about it that way. And the critic can’t do that unless s/he says this is not that good because of such and such, this was really worthwhile because of this and that, etc. I know a lot of dance enthusiasts think negative reviews are responsible for decreasing audiences (someone posed that question to chief NYTimes critic Alastair Macaulay when he spoke at Barnard a while ago) but I disagree with that unless the critic really sarcastically blasts all of dance or something. And I still think every critic everywhere would have to be doing that all the time in order for it to have an effect. Arlene Croce said it’s the critic’s job in a democracy to be critical. People get upset when their favorite dancer or choreographer is criticized, but hopefully then there are enough voices around for a real debate — although with arts criticism this is unfortunately not often the case. I’m probably getting way off the point (my headache is still lingering!), but just wondered if others had any thoughts. You should also definitely read her post on the Culturist here where she talks about a workshop she recently led where she asked for different kinds of responses to a dance performance, and received some very interesting ones, like a poem written by a Colombian critic in response to a Maguy Marin piece (the video of which she embedded). I definitely think there is a place for some criticism like this — I agree with the commenter that the poem did make me see things I hadn’t before, but I think there needs to be more of what I mentioned above as well — with some judgment and analysis. Any thoughts?
Poets & Dance Writers and Romantics & Poseurs
I’ve been so busy lately trying to juggle various things I got very behind on my reading, particularly dance reading. So I spent part of my weekend browsing the online arts sections of my old favorite magazines and newspapers and found a few interesting things. I’m really loving some of Claudia La Rocco’s recent reviews. This Bayadere piece is really beautiful in her descriptions, and this one had a poetic charm to it as well — look at the Ravel simile! Made me wonder what her background was — if she was a fiction writer or poet. So, I did a Google search and found several of her poems, like this one and this one, and this one on Shen Wei. (At least I assume this is the same Claudia La Rocco!) It does make perfect sense; poetry, fiction, and dance (and perhaps music) writing have a good deal in common. It’s so hard to write about something so inherently visual or sensual and it really makes you strive for that perfectly specific adjective or metaphor or simile that will convey to your readers as precisely as possible what you saw and what it felt like, how it touched the senses and the soul, without resorting to cliche (which tells the reader nothing). Of course you also need analytical faculties, but I personally find the most challenging part is just getting a well-written, apt description down without over-using the “amazing”s and “beautiful”s, etc. etc.
I was also looking through Time Out, after Ariel pointed out a few Gia Kourlas pieces, and found this interview with Tom Gold, who recently retired from New York City Ballet, particularly interesting. About halfway through he talks about how City Ballet has changed over the years and how technique now seems to be stressed over developing the dancer’s personality, conveying the humanity of the dance. I think that’s all important. I feel like, with a few definite exceptions, dancers are focusing so much on the steps, on making them perfect without thinking about what’s behind them, what they’re trying to convey to us with those steps. Didn’t Damian Woetzel recently say people don’t go to the ballet to see technique? We don’t! Gold said he hopes we return to the age of Romanticism soon and I couldn’t agree more. He also has a few amusing expressions of annoyance at artists who are so insistent on being the “new thing,” on being original, that they seem to lose focus on what they’re doing, on the joy and spontaneity of dance, and their work ends up being contrived and derivative anyway. There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new ways of bringing things to light and exploring them.
The Power of Words Versus Pictures Versus Video
You guys, I’m wondering if people can answer a question for me. I guess this applies mainly to my readers who are not located in NY and who have never before seen American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, or any of the companies I write about. But it also applies to anyone who has an answer really.
Do you think if a writer is really good and can convey the beauty of a dancer or of a dance, that pictures are unnecessary? Are there any such writers? Joan Acocella, Arlene Croce, Edwin Denby, Julie Kavanagh, Laura Jacobs? (I use those examples because those writers have published books, in which there are few if any visuals). Is it even possible to convey the beauty of an inherently visual art form in words? Do pictures even do justice since dance is not just visual, but inherently movement-oriented?
Do you need a combination of writing and visuals? Is there a difference between blogs, books, magazines, and newspapers in terms of what you expect?
Do you care more about the dancers the writer is talking about if the writer posts a picture of them? Do you have more of a human connection to them that way? If so, is a full-body picture of them in a dance pose better than a headshot? Do you connect more to the face or body form? Or do you honestly just not care about them at all if there’s no chance you’ll ever see them perform?
I ask mainly because bloggers are beginning to run into copyright violation issues with videos and photos.